Dealing with backlog: Horizon Zero Dawn

As usual I'm the last one to the party. When this game got released for PC back in 2020 I immediately bought it because I knew I wanted to play it, even though I knew the broad strokes of the story from having watched Toni play it. But it had a rough PC release so I waited before playing it and then other things got in the way.

Finally I decided it was time and it was an amazing ride!

As usual I wanted to do all the side content in a region before I moved on, but I soon realized that the Hunting Grounds were very difficult on a low level. So I left those and endeavoured to do them as the last thing in the game. I went on to do literally everything else. All the collectables, all the bandit camps, all the tallnecks and all the sidequests. Even all the weapon tutorials. 

The main story was just as amazing as I remembered, even more so now that I got all the details. 

I wish the game had had romance options and I wouldn't have had to kill Nil. I saw it coming. I just wish I didn't have to. I liked him. I also wished there had been more interactions with the Sun King and with Erend. And Petra was great. Just so many cool characters. 

The tallnecks were always an experience and I had a lot of fun climbing them. 

Interestingly the machines that scared me the most for the longest time were the bellowbacks. Not even fireclaws in the DLC were as scary. 

I left the DLC until after I had finished the main story of the base game. Frozen Wilds was really cool and Aratak is big brother material. Finding out some backgroun for Sylens was interesting too. He's a really interesting character, morally grey and incredibly shrewd. 

After I had 100%ed Frozen Wilds I went back to the base game and collected some last achievements and did all the hunting grounds and with that 100%ed the base game too. I wanted to try to collect all the datapoints I had missed, but some were in side rooms in main story locations that seemed to have become inaccessible once that story quest was completed. So I gave up that idea pretty soon. 

This game gave me a huge post-game hangover and even if I've started another game now I still think about HZD every day. I can't wait for Forbidden West to drop on PC!

Grey's Anatomy S19 and Station 19 S06

It's the end of an era for Grey's Anatomy with Ellen Pompeo leaving the show. How can we have Grey's without Grey? Turns out pretty well. They're doing a good job of establishing the new interns. I really enjoyed seeing the social commentary on the abortion issue in the US and with it a reintroduction of Addison Montgomery. 

I don't approve of the hint that Richard is going to fall off the wagon or whatever's going on with Teddy. Things were finally looking up for Teddy and Owen T_T Taryn and Levi are the best and I want everything good for them. Yasuda is probably my favourite new intern. Simone needs to learn to follow her heart. Lucas is a fuck-up, but an adorable fuck-up. 

All in all I really enjoyed this season and I'm excited for whatever comes next, with or without Meredith.

As for Station 19 we have Maya trying to be better and trying to fix her relationship with Carina, but not before getting seriously close to the edge. We have Jack trying to form a relationship with his biological family as well as trying to find his foster siblings. We have Travis running for mayor. The relationship between Sully and the Chief is reaching make or break. (I really just want Sully back with Andy, please). Theo is on a mission that becomes all-consuming to the point of destroying every single relationship he has. 

I don't like the new girl. And Dixon is reaching new heights on his assholery. 

That finale though O_O

Sweden Rock Festival 2023

SRF 2014.

SRF 2015. 

SRF 2016. 

SRF 2017. 

SRF 2018.

SRF 2019.

SRF 2022.

We've been home for two days now and reality is starting to settle back in. Although my voice is still gone. This year I shared the whole thing on Instagram as well so I recommend going there for pictures :)

On Tuesday last week we got in the car at 5am and after having picked up the last person of our roadtrip gang, we finally got on the road around 5:30am. Amazingly we didn't stop for bathroom breaks or snack breaks as many times as earlier years and we arrived at the camp ground just after 11:30am. Made incredibly good time on that journey! Got the tents up and for the rest of that day it was all party.

The next morning most of us crawled out of our tents around 8am and went to find breakfast, which turned into way more of a quest than any of us wanted first thing in the morning. The regular ready-to-go breakfast bags from earlier years were nowhere to be seen and so we begrudgingly half-assed our own. At least I got morning coffee. 

My first concert of this year was Soilwork. They were the band that got me into death metal as a teenager and I used to love them, but now I haven't really listened to them much in the last ten years or so. After this concert I'll definitely pick them up again! The entire front row became a mosh-pit during their concert. It was glorious!

Airbourne was playing around dinner time and so we decided to go in and half-watch them while eating. We then returned to the camp for a short while, until it was time to go back and see Def Leppard, Avatar and Mötley Crüe. Avatar easily wins best concert of the year for me ♥

The second day started out strong with Korpiklaani and then we returned to camp until evening when it was time for Kamelot. I don't really listen to Kamelot (I've heard like two songs), but I've liked what I heard so I decided to tag along to see them. It was a really cool show! After that concert we spent the rest of the day at the camp until it was time for Deep Purple and Europe. Neither of which I was super excited about, but they both seemed like bands I shoudl take the chance to see while I still can. Deep Purple was too psychedelic experimental instrumental solo jam session for me. After every song there was a solo jam session for each band member (probably to allow the singer to catch a break). But aside from that it struck all of us how damned polite and sweet they were. All of us were just standing there like awwwwwh. Europe, being Swedish, has a huge following and it was very clear whenever one of the mor well-known songs were played.

The third day is when my voice went to shit. This year the festival area was super dusty. I don't know what they did different earlier years, but it has never been this dusty. I saw several people walking around with scarves/bandanas/masks covering their mouths and noses, and for me that's a lesson learned for next year. More than one person in our camp got red and irritated eyes from all the dust. But anyway... I had only two concerts planned for Friday and they were in the evening so most of the day was spent partying in the camp. We then finished the day with Powerwolf (amazing as usual) and Iron Maiden. Iron Maiden mainly played lesser known songs for the first half-hour and with none of us being big fans, we decided to leave after that. Once we had returned to the camp and it had been maybe forty minutes since they started playing we heard Fear of the Dark. First well-known song of that gig. 

Last day, Saturday, and I could barely speak. We had only two concerts planned for Saturday as well, which was just as well because traditionally everybody is completely beat and ready to leave and still trying their hardest to keep the party and energy levels up. To mixed results. The first concert was early, Joddla med Siv, they're a Swedish folk rock band from Skåne and they have a MASSIVELY HUGE following in Skåne, which the organizors seem to have missed or underappreciated. They were on one of the smaller stages, when they could easily have filled the second to largest stage or maybe even the largest one. People crowded in front of the stage, spilling out through the entrances and exits on either side trying to squeeze in to see them. And they delivered. It was amazing! I've seen the number 35k people in the audience thrown around...

After Joddla was done we returned to camp and started to slowly pack our things together while continuing the party. Before going in to see Ghost as the final act of the festival we made sure all our things were gathered up and then we went back inside. Ghost was really great, but Avatar still wins best concert of the year. 

After the concert there was a small celebration of the ferstival's 30th anniversary with small clips from every festival playing on the big picture screens on the biggest stage and fireworks. We then went back to camp to grab our things and head for the car. We packed our stuff and ourselves in the car and after a clusterfuck traffic jam of everybody else having the same brilliant idea, we finally got out onto the road at 00:40am. Because it was so late we ended up taking several more stretch-your-legs breaks and we arrived home at around 8am on Sunday morning. We showered, unpacked, and then fell into bed until around 2pm.

It's now 1am on the Wednesday after and my voice is still terrible, but slowly getting better. 

Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities

This show is an anthology show like Love, Death and Robots or Black Mirror, but with horror stories. There are eight stories in this first batch, two of which are based on Lovecraft stories and in my opinion those two were the best ones. 

Lot 36 is a story about a xenophobic guy who works at a storage unit complex and specifically with clearing out storage units belonging to people who have died and haven't had their things claimed within an allotted time frame. He then sells any valuables on the side so he's basically a thief. He stumbles onto an old guy of Nazi origin who was deep inside the mythical Nazi mysticism, and things go sideways from there as the guy delves deeper than he should. It was a really slow story and the preposterous way it ended left a lot to be desired. Sebastian Roché was great in this.

Graveyard Rats is a story about a grave robber in post-WW1 20th century who is fighting his own war with the rats for the buried valuables. It was a fun story mostly, way too preposterous to be called anything even remotely scary. And it ended like a cautionary tale. 

The Autopsy was the first story that was really somewhat good. The erratic behavior of a mine worker causes something like a bomb to go off inside a mine and killing a bunch of people. A doctor is then called in to do the autopsy of the workers, and what he finds is really disturbing. The entire story is pretty disturbing, albeit somewhat predictable. 

The Outside is about a girl who's struggled her entire life with feeling ugly, unwanted and weird. She happens upon a lotion that's supposeed to fix everything. This story was really weird and really unsatisfying and not at all scary. Dan Stevens was great as the salesman though. 

Pickman's Model is the first Lovecraftian story and it's really right up my alley. It gives me the whole chilling, spine-tingling, not exactly scary but something is definitely wrong kind of feeling. It's Lovecraft's short story by the same name put to the screen, and it's amazing. Doesn't hurt that Ben Barnes is the protagonist either, and Crispin Glover was amazing as Pickman. 

Dreams in the Witch House is the second Lovecraftian story and while the writer has taken some artistic liberties it's really, really well made and turned into a classic haunted house story with some Lovecraftian themes and supernatural tendencies, and I'm all for it! Rupert Grint did a great job as the protagonist. 

The Viewing was something like a fever dream someone high on LSD might come up with. It was just very very weird and neither of us liked it. It's about a bunch of outstanding people being invited into the home of a rich elderly recluse. He shows off his collection, because as a rich man he likes collecting things. All the things. One thing he has collected is a meteor. Which turns out to be a space egg, which expectedly cracks open and all hell breaks loose. 

The Murmuring is a classic haunted house tale. But it focused more on the marital issues of the two people in the house than the ghosts or the house, and so this story that should've been exactly my thing turned into a slog. Andrew Lincoln is in this one and he does a very convincing job. 

The thing with anthologies is that it won't always be good, but it's always interesting and overall worth it. I hope there'll be a second volume.

The Office

I've been considering watching this show for years. But a lot of comedy is cringe to me so I just never really found the incentive to, until Toni decided to sit me down and watch it with him a while back. 

And yes, almost every single episode had me hiding behind my hands saying "Oh no, Michael, no please, no Michael, no, stop, Michael".

That said, once Michael was gone from the show I was just sad after every episode and I'd just end up saying "I miss Michael" after every episode without him. Annoying bastard grew on me xD

The very last season dropped the ball a bit, but everything up until then was golden. Now I don't only recognize, but also know the origin behind every meme :3

And it's really cute watching a show that takes place in 2005 and seeing all the budding tech. Youtube launches as brand new. Everybody's got a flip phone... It's so cute.

My last 5 books: Vampires and fangirls

1. Guilty Pleasures, by Laurell K. Hamilton. Interestingly I found out about this book series from a Buzzfeed list over the best literary vampires. It's the first book in the Anita Blake series and she feels sort of like a female Harry Dresden, but with less magic and more guns and not as much brains. I like it. Not sure I really like the mind control thing the vampires can do, but I really like Jean-Claude so far. As for the investigative element there really wasn't much going for Anita, she went down all the wrong avenues and only discovered who the killer was by having him literally reveal himself to her when he tried to kill her. So just dumb luck (or dumb bad luck?) Anita complains a lot, is scared a lot and just goes 'fuck it all' a lot. The best characters in this story were Phillip and Jean-Claude, and they're mostly absent. The reading is fun and fast-paced, but comes off as very shallow and without much substance. It's sexy and bloody, but also an action movie in book format. Did I have fun reading this? Yes. Will the story or characters stay with me? Probably not.

2. The Vampire Diaries: The Awakening & The Struggle, by L.J. Smith. I love the TV show and wanted to read the books after the show finished. It took me a while to get into it, mainly because Elena is extremely unlikeable for the first half of the first book. She only wants Stefan because he's the only boy at the high school who doesn't fall over himself to be with her. Like come on. There are some glaring differences between the books and the show. Aunt Jenna is called Judith and she has a fiancé named Robert who doesn't exist in the show. Jeremy doesn't exist in the books, instead Elena has a baby sister of four years old called Margaret. Caroline is a bitch throughout the books and Elena's main antagonist, instead of one of the girl trio as she is in the show. Instead there's a fourth girl called Meredith who's friends with Elena and Bonnie. Bonnie is still a witch and the most innocent and childlike of the bunch and she's infatuated with both Alaric and Damon. Katherine is stone-cold dead in the books and doesn't show up as an antagonist. The whole doppelganger thing isn't in the books. Stefan and Damon are five hundred years old and from Renaissance era Italy and not from Civil War era US. The books take place in the 90s and Elena fussing for a call from Stefan means she has to stay put at home where there's a phone. Stefan doesn't live at the ancestral home of the Salvatores (they are not a founding family), instead he lives at a boarding house. As for the events in the story they play out pretty much the same as in the show. Elena's parents are dead. Stefan shows up hoping to find a place among the humans of a small town. Damon follows him and weird things start to happen in the town. Stefan gets blamed. Everybody is enamoured with Damon because he compels everybody he meets. Teacher gets killed, Alaric shows up. Everything comes to a point at the Founder's Day celebration. Stefan and Elena both seem to think that Damon is behind everything weird that's been going on, but with the way the book ended dare I say... there's an Original lurking? Also the town is called Fell's Church and not Mystic Falls. I'm actually excited to read the continuation. 

3. The Ouroboros Cycle Book 1: A Monster's Coming of Age Story, by G.D. Falksen. This book starts out intriguing but then falls into sort of a lull until Babette meets Iosef, which is about halfway. The prologue, while being intriguing, has almost no bearing on the story until the very end. The story starts when Babette is sixteen and she is about to be introduced into the Society of high-socety 19th century France. She hates it and would rather read than dance. She meets Korbinian, a German officer of noble blood, and they quickly fall in love and although they have to jump through some hoops to be together their path seems plainly laid out before them. That doesn't go according to plan. Fast-forward a few years and Babette ends up having to flee from France. Her friend Iosef Shashavani agrees to help her under the pretense that they are to be married and he takes her to Georgia. This is when the interesting things start to happen and the book comes into its own as a vampire story. As the first part of a quintology this book leaves a lot of questions unanswered, but I really like many of the characters. Babette is badass. Iosef is dreamy. Korbinian is so sweet, and the hidden world which is only partially glimpsed in this book promises to be very interesting, so I'm excited to keep reading this series. 

4. Ship It, by Britta Lundin. I went into this book not sure if I'd like it. I was expecting it to be too much. Too girly. Too stupid and simpy and mushy. But instead I found something super relatable. Claire is me at sixteen. The fangirl experience of reading and writing fics and just gushing all over the internet for your OTPs and the fandom and the content and the actors and just having so many feels for things that aren't technically real. I fell in love with the book at the description of Claire at the first convention panel: "There's a girl in the front row who is all-out bawling, and I know how she feels. Emotions are, like, leaking out of my pores. Crying actually seems like a pretty minor reaction. All things considered, I might literally explode. 'Local girl explodes at Boise Comics Convention. Doctors mystified, but witnesses suspect she had too many feels. Details at eleven.'" And that's just page 64. Everything in this book is relatable. Trying to explain fandom to people outside of it. Trying to explain slash or ships or OTPs... It's such a struggle and I've been there. I'm there, still. How the book attempts to explore sexuality and sexual awakenings as well as just the feeling of belonging you get when you're in a place like a convention where everybody there just gets you because they're there for the same reason... It made my heart swell because I feel it. I'm one of you. And I never had the online presence Claire does because I never dared publish my fics. But oh, I feel it. The end had me straight up crying. Feels. 

5. Fangirl, by Rainbow Rowell. When I started this book I really wasn't sure if this would be a book I would end up finishing. But I endeavoured to give it 100 pages like I usually do. I didn't even notice the 100 page mark. At that point I was so pulled into the story that I had trouble putting the book down. I deeply relate to Cath and this is her coming of age story, her growing up experience, and she does some serious growing in the course of the novel. She's shy and quiet and anti-social and insecure in the beginning, but she ends up more outgoing towards the end. She's still shy and insecure, but less withdrawn about it and she dares to lean on others and learns to trust the people around her. Link is wonderful. Reagan is just what Cath needs to push her out of her shell. And throughout it all there's Cath's fangirling experience with Simon Snow which just resonates with me. The scene where they go to the midnight release of the last book had me drowning in memories of my own. The only fourth wall break in this book that probably should've been edited out is when Link mentions Harry Potter once, when the entire book is about Cath fangirling over Simon Snow, which is set up as a substitute for Harry Potter. Why even mention Potter at all?!?!? My favourite quote, because it explains why I love the Internet, is: "There are other people on the Internet. It's awesome. You get all the benefits of 'other people' without the body odour and the eye contact." This book is relatable to the extreme.

Dealing with backlog: Lovecraftian themed games, part 1

So I noticed that I had a whole bunch of Lovecraftian themed games in my Steam library and decided to go through them all. These are all games I've bought over the years but never played because other games held my attention more. 

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. This is an old Bethesda game from 2006 and I probably got this game two PCs ago and it has since just sat in my library. All the negative reviews on Steam talked about this game not working unless you fiddled with ini files and downloaded mods and patches to make it work on modern systems. To nobody's surprise it didn't work. And I couldn't be bothered to do all the fiddling and trouble-shooting.

Conarium. This is a puzzle adventure game of the walking sim variety. It isn't exactly scary but it keeps an unsettling vibe throughout, which I really enjoy. There's a lot of things they've drawn from the Cthulhu Mythos and storywise this seems to be a fanfiction sequel to At the Mountains of Madness which has to be one of my favourite Lovecraft stories overall (tekeli-li?). I played through the whole thing in one sitting and the only annoying segment was the part where I was being chased by mummies. Both endings were really cool. 

Dagon: by H.P. Lovecraft. This is a visual novel audiobook of Lovecraft's short story Dagon, which was the first story in the Cthulhu Mythos. This whole game is a deep-dive into Lovecraft's life and career, with tidbits of information around the author himself and his Cthulhu Mythos in-between story segments. Dagon is a very good introduction to the Mythos and a really chilling short story overall. Having it read out loud as an audiobook with visual elements to help only made it so much better.

Darkness Within: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder. This is a point-and-click adventure puzzle game from 2007 and I half expected it wouldn't work, but it worked surprisingly well. With only the small caveat that I had to play it in a window instead of fullscreen because the text became too pixalated to read in fullscreen. The game is about a man slowly descending into madness after glimpsing the beyond, in true Lovecraft fashion, and I had a really good time with it. 

Darkness Within 2: The Dark Lineage. The continuation of the previous game, with the same protag. Same thing with having to play in windowed mode or everything would be too pixelated to read. This game had a lot more clear and obvious Lovecraftian references, rather than the "inspired by" that the previous game was. This sequel had more infuriating puzzles though and sometimes Howard refused to go through a door or open a cabinet because he couldn't see it (but I could) until he turned on the flashlight. Tiny annoyances that made the experience a bit lesser than the previous game. Still had a good time with it!

Forgive Me Father. This is an arena shooter with a Lovecraftian spin. I'm not very good at these types of game because they're so fast-paced and I can't aim quick enough. That said my first session lasted two hours and I managed to beat the first boss. There is a story element of course, but I'm generally too busy being stressed about the pace to pay attention. But while I did have some fun with the fast-paced gameplay, in the end I felt no incentive to come back to it. Ultimately not my kind of game, despite the Lovecraftian theme.

I technically have a bunch more Lovecraftian themed game in my library, but after months of only playing small games (either action or adventure puzzle) I really felt the need to deep dive into a huge expansive open world RPG again. So this will be part 1.

Dealing with backlog: We Were Here series

After A Way Out we decided to check out this series of games that we've talked about trying.

We Were Here was a lot of fun. Originally we wanted to use the in-game voice mechanic, but we soon switched over to Discord again. It was just a lot more convenient. We had a lot of fun explaining things to each other and figuring out what to do and where to go. The only hurdle was the chess puzzle because Toni doesn't know chess at all. So I ended up filming it on my phone from his screen so I could mimic the movements on my own screen :P Our only complaint about this game was that it was too short. 

We Were Here Too started out fun. But at the end of the second room there is a cube puzzle. A timed cube puzzle. I was in the room with the spiral staircase and Toni had to figure out which cube corresponded with the cross on my wall (a.k.a the flattened out cube). We both became increasingly frustrated as we kept failing and failing and failing. And then we decided to end it there and try again some other time when we were less annoyed and frustrated. But when we came back to it two weeks later we discovered that we couldn't start from where we had left off. We looked it up and found out that the savepoint system within the game was broken and you basically had to complete the game in one sitting. There was a thread on Steam where it had been reported in like 2019 and the devs had responded to it in 2022... We decided to fuck this game.

We Were Here Together was fun throughout. We struggled a little bit with the puzzle for filling the barrels with differently-coloured liquids, but once we figured it out (with the help of a guide) the rest of it went pretty smoothly. Except for the puzzle where we were in separate but similar rooms and we had to line things up to match, because half the things were either missing or uninteractable. Looked it up and discovered that it was a known bug. Restarted the game and suddenly everything was working as intended. If it hadn't we probably wouldn't have finished this one either. But this game was a mostly smooth experience with a fun little story. 

We Were Here Forever was easily the best game in the franchise so far. None of the puzzles were too frustrating, the game was really pretty at times, and this is where it became obvious that all the games were connected story-wise. Anything that's timed are bound to annoy us because none of us manage the time constraint well. In this game it was the underwater puzzle, but we figured it out without too much hassle. One of the last puzzles with the recipe and the creation of an astrolabe was also timed, but I had quite a bit of fun with that one. 

This series was quite a bit of fun, but my brain got tired xD

Dealing with backlog: Supergiant bundle

Everybody knows Supergiant Games now, right, after the success of Hades? I feel like everybody talked about their earlier games too. I had previously tried to play Bastion in which I loved the art style and the narrator and I had fun with the story, but the gameplay failed to engage me. 

But since each and every Supergiant game is different from one another, aside from being beautifully hand-drawn, I decided to get their other games as well. Hopefully one of them would be right up my alley, right? And I was really hoping to enjoy Hades, despite knowing it's a roguelite and I have a bad history with those.

Here's how it went.

Transistor. It reminded me of Shadowrun in more ways than one, except it was more action-y and not enough TBS-y. Having the combat switch into half-TBS by the press of a button was pretty genius. The story was super sad and the ending almost made me cry. Did I like it? It was alright. For an RPG-girl it wasn't what I was used to and the combat did present difficulties sometimes, but I managed to complete the whole thing. It was alright.

Pyre. This is the game I've heard the least about out of the bunch, and yet the one I was most excited to try. It's like an RPG Tower Defense game and the first time I started it up I found it moderately fun. But it failed to draw me in despite being extremely beautiful and character interaction being on point. The fighting system proved cumbersome, unresponsive and uninstinctive. I got through three battles in my first 1½ hours of gameplay and it just failed to be engaging and was mostly frustrating. In the end I didn't come back to it.

Hades. As much as I was hoping to enjoy this one I didn't expect to end up liking it as much as I did. I had an unreasonable amount of fun with this game for someone who doesn't enjoy roguelites. I got through Tartaros and Asphodel easily enough. I struggled a bit with Elysium, but soon enough I got through Elysium as well easily enough. The Temple of Styx is where the trouble starts. I hate, hate, hate the poison and there's no way to replenish your HP before the final boss. It's basically a gauntlet after you get out of Elysium and more often than not I failed that gauntlet. Once I managed to get past the final boss, but because it's a roguelite the main story still sends you right back to where you started. After 25 escape attempts I was starting to feel kind of fed up with the game. Not annoyed, but just like I was done with it. I got all the way to the end. Didn't complete the story, but man... I don't know how many more times I can keep doing the same thing over and over. I'm starting to think that I lucked out on Boon combos the first time I got through to the end. I'll probably come back to it at some point, because I did have fun, but this isn't a game that I can just play to completion without breaks. I might come back to it just for Thanatos though ♥

Originally, I started this project in January, but then Fire Emblem Engage, Hogwarts Legacy and Atomic Heart came along and stole all of my attention. I returned to Pyre in March after I had finished the aforementioned three games. 

Shadow and Bone S02

I loved the last season and I was super excited for this season. I knew the second book of Shadow & Bone was the slowest one, so I wasn't surprised that the show followed that theme for the first half of it. The second half of the season goes into the third book and the stakes get high. 

For most of it they stay mostly true to the books, although they change a few things up to put the Crows in it, but that's alright. 

I didn't expect that scene between Kaz and Inej at the end though. That's supposed to happen at the end of Crooked Kingdom and we haven't even gotten properly started on the events of Six of Crows yet! 

The final episodes starts to poke at the events of Six of Crows and even a little bit at the events of King of Scars, so I'm just very excited for the next season! So many good things to come!

They did change a few things regarding Mal and Alina too. I hope things get to where they are in the books because they deserve it. 

I need to reread the books.

The Last of Us S01

The entire gaming world has been buzzing about this show so it was a given that we would watch it. And yeah, we loved it. Toni was a bit disappointed with the lack of zombies, and I've seen others complain about that too. But personally I felt there were enough zombies to create the overhanging arc and fear of them, but not enough to take away from the story, and the story is one of friendship and trust and grief and growing up in a broken world. 

So many of the episodes broke our hearts, but equally there were so many heart-warming moments.

We both know the games. Toni more so than me, and we kept drawing parallells between things that happened in the show with things that happened in the games. 

The show was perfect and I'm excited to see the next season :3

Game completed: Atomic Heart

I've been excited about this game since I saw the trailer that looked so much like Bioshock, but with robots instead of powered-up drugged-out humans, and with communism instead of capitalism. 

Did it deliver on the Bioshock premise? Kind of, but not all that much until the end. 

Storywise it does what Wolfenstein does. Wolfenstein plays with the idea that Germany won WW2, Atomic Heart plays with the idea that Soviet won WW2 while still going somewhat into the Cold War vibe with how much the US is talked about in the game. 

So the game takes place in a city/research complex above the clouds that's a communist utopia and where robots have replaced all menial work and boring tasks. The new scentific breakthrough is called Kollektiv 2.0 and will allow people to control their robots with their minds. Sounds great, right? It goes exactly as wrong as it possibly can. 

As for the player character he's called P-3 or Major Sergey Nechayev. He's an agent in the employ of the brilliant scientist Dmitry Sechenov who's in charge of Kollektiv. When the robots go hostile and all hell breaks loose Sechenov sends P-3 to deal with the mess and find Viktor Petrov, who's responsible for the disaster according to Sechenov. Things don't go as planned.

Throughout this P-3 has a cool glove with an AI attached called Charles and he befriends a horny af vending machine called Nora. Charles keeps analyzing situations and having analytical discussions with P-3, which thrusts P-3 into critical thinking instead of just blindly following orders. 

Every boss fight in the game is epic. The first one against Hedgie gave me some trouble because I hadn't completely figured out mechanics and stuff yet, but once I figured it out it was ezpz. Belyash and Natasha were both really cool fights. Dewdrop was gross. 

When I got to the theatre I was pretty bored with the repetitive enemies in the game and the boss fights were highlights. The badass rock music made the otherwise menial fights against general mobs much better. Once I got to Pavlov my overall startegy was to find a smaller room and then camp by the door with the Kalash and just mow down every enemy that walked through the door. I ended up with some pretty cool piles of either robot scrap or mutant waste.

 

Every mission zone was cool af and I loved finding and listening to Chirpers, despite not really taking the time to read the computers. However I really disliked the open world. Every robot you ever killed would be repaired in seconds because the repair drones never stopped coming. You'd run out of ammo in no time at all just trying to explore, which had the end effect that I skipped testing chambers altogether. I didn't want to spend more time in the open world than absolutely necessary. I think that's my only real complaint of the game tbh. Besides some small bugs and glitches here and there, the open world was the only real issue to me. I ran straight into one testing chamber while travelling between two mission zones and figured I might as well do it, but the lock to get inside required a goddamn key disc that I didn't have and finding it would mean exploring with robots chasing me around and not leaving me alone to do my thing. So I ignored it and moved on to the next mission zone.

I will say, however, that mowing enemies down with cars was a lot of fun. Too bad the achievement didn't track properly. Achievements didn't track properly for a lot of the game. Somehow I have missed an unmissable story achievement (even though I did that part of the story). I might do another playthrough at some point and try to take my time in exploring and doing everything, but that's a long way away.

Game completed: Fire Emblem Engage

I started this game a few days after release, but then Hogwarts Legacy came and stole all my attention and I only returned to the game after I had finished HL. This is the fourth main series Fire Emblem game I've played, the sixth if you count the two recent spin-offs (Awakening, Fates, Three Houses, Warriors, Heroes)

The way I play these games is that I do as many extra battles as possible because I want to increase support between all the characters as much as possible before the game ends. Because every support interaction gives you more background for every character, which creates more of a lasting impression and adds more to their personalities. As much as I loved Diamant, Alcryst, Alfred, Jade, Ivy, Rosado, Veyle, Panette and Yunaka, my heart eventually ended up with Zelkov. Is anyone really surprised? 

It did break my heart however to read the post-game character sheets and find out that Alfred died young. His childhood frailty caught up with him T_T

Because I've never played the old Fire Emblem games I've mostly only heard about most of the Emblem characters via other games. Marth especially keeps popping up everywhere. The only Emblem characters I properly knew were Lucina, Corrin and Byleth. If you count the DLC Emblems then ofc I knew Edelgard/Dimitri/Claude and Camilla as well. 

As far as the story goes it's a pretty standard Fire Emblem story. There's a dragon at the end of it all whose evil generals and evil armies invade the countries of the world and it's up to our hero and their friends to save the world and defeat the dragon. Funnily enough I ended up feeling really sorry for Zephia, wishing Griss would just join me already, and Sombron's story made me sad. 

The death at the very beginning was a bit overplayed, though. I've known this character for ten minutes and I'm supposed to care about their death? Alear, the MC, doesn't even remember this character, why is she grieving so hard? The correlating battle towards the end hits deeper, because then you've gotten to know the character via word-of-mouth and Alear has regained her memories. 

They did overplay the death card a bit in this game. Alear dies like three times lol.

Overall I really enjoyed this game, but it wasn't as good as Three Houses, which just ticked all the boxes. Better than Awakening and Fates, though, by a long shot. 

I might play through it again at some point after the last DLC Emblem pack has released.

After the trailer dropped everybody complained about Alear's annoying bangs, but did you see Pandreo?!?!?!

Game completed: Hogwarts Legacy

Those are basically my feelings right now. But I've done everything the game offers and now I either have to wait for new content or until enough time has passed that I'll feel good about playing it again.

The first part of this post will be general stuff. I'll warn before we go into story and spoilers. 

Before I even got the game I made sure to connect my Wizarding World account with my Warner Bros account so I could have my official House and my actual wand in the game. Connecting those two also provides a bit of extra cosmetic goodies in the game :) Of course I also preordered the Deluxe edition so I could get all those extra goodies and the 72 hours of early access. 

When I first booted up the game it preset everything at Medium settings. I changed them to High and got started. Didn't have any stuttering or fps drops or graphic bugs or glitches throughout until they dropped the first patch and then I started getting stuttering the first few seconds whenever I started the game... Thanks... 

The world is huge with lots to explore and throughout there is a slightly changed version of the soundtrack from the movies and it just keeps hitting me deep in my fangirl heart. It's been a long time since I was this invested in a game and it managed to meet my every expectation and it completely deserved the hype. 

The combat is fast-paced, fun and instinctive/reactive and I enjoyed it way more than I usually enjoy combat in games.

I managed to get all of the achievements for the game. Most of them were either story based or based on collectables so most of them were easy to get if you really went and did everything the game had to offer. Two of them were combat based, but neither of them were too difficult to achieve even for a filthy casual like me :) The last three requires you to replay the intro up until level 9-10 ish, because those three are House-specific. 

From this point on there will be spoilers! Major ones! Don't say I didn't warn you!

I've played the intro four times by now, but the action-y almost movie-like story sequences of it never get boring. It definitely starts with a bang. Dragon attack, ancient magic shenanigans, pensieves... You name it, they got it. When the camera first panned over Hogwarts with the game version of Hedwig's Theme I started crying. I've cried a few times during the course of this game. 

I loved going to classes and I wish they'd included more of them. Especially Potions classes. I need more Professor Sharp in my life. And Professor Garlick. Actually, Professor Hecat is cool too. Just give me more classes. My favourite class is probably the first Defence Against the Dark Arts when I got to beat Sebastian's ass. I love Sebastian. And his quest to save his sister and subsequent accidental delve into the Dark Arts breaks my heart but it makes so much sense. I think I actually audibly gasped when he used the Killing Curse on his uncle. 

Natty started out as the least interesting character you build a friendship with, but the end of her questline had me really fricking invested and the cutscene at the very end which shows her facing off against a boggart that takes the shape of her dead father just had me in tears and I was so proud of her. 

Poppy was so sweet. So fitting that her name is Sweeting. Her story didn't pull me in as much as Natty and Sebastian, but damn if it wasn't amazing to fight alongside centaurs and meet hippogriffs and find snidgets ♥ 

The quest leading up to finding Jackdaw's rest was different depending on which House you were in, which is why there were separate achievements for it, I assume. For Ravenclaw the quest involved helping Ollivander find a stolen family heirloom wand of unusual make and core. For Gryffindore the quest involved Nearly-Headless Nick and going into the Hogwarts kitchen in an attempt to help Nick join the Headless Hunt. For Hufflepuff the quest was to solve a really old murder mystery and it brought us straight to Azkaban! o_o I wasn't expecting to go there in this game... For Slytherin the quest involves the Headmaster's personal house-elf Scrope and going into Apollonia Black's personal and hidden cavern by the Black Lake. All in all very different quests, but doing all of them served to create a very complete portrait of who Richard Jackdaw was. 

The main quest really had its moments too. San Bakar's trial was the most memorable and amazing. Getting to tame and ride a huge graphorn was just *_* And using polyjuice potion to transform into Phineas Nigellus Black for one single quest to get inside his office was so much fun and I was laughing the whole time.

I wish there had been some kind of interaction with Morganach as well as the Keepers, but no such luck. The end of Rookwood was disappointing, but the final fight against Ranrok really made up for it. I loved seeing all the professors come together and help with the battle underneath Hogwarts. 

This is my Game of the Year. Not even a challenge.